A man who went to a country hospital with stomach pains last weekend is now dead.

He chose not to pay hundreds of dollars for a non-emergency bed at Keith Hospital in the upper south-east of South Australia and planned to drive on more than half an hour to Bordertown Hospital, where free public system treatment would be available.

But the man then collapsed in the Keith Hospital car park, was reassessed as an emergency case and then flown to Adelaide's Flinders Medical Centre, where he died.

Keith Hospital CEO Bill Hender said the man left the hospital last Saturday because he considered a non-emergency bed was too expensive.

"He was given the option of either paying a fee as a non-emergency public patient in the Keith private hospital or going to Bordertown where arrangements had been made for that to happen and then his condition subsequently worsened and he re-presented," Mr Hender explained.

SA Health Minister John Hill said he would support an investigation of the death.

"We don't know until it's been properly investigated whether the clinical decisions were appropriate or not and what the circumstances were," he said.

"We have no problems working closely with Keith Hospital to get it right. If there's something happened in this case which wasn't as it should have been we should find out and work out how to fix it.

"I think the issue is whether the doctor thought the patient should be admitted because it was an emergency. You wouldn't admit a patient just because they want to be admitted in any of our hospitals. That is not the way the system works. The doctor makes a clinical decision."

Mr Hill defended the health protocols.

"Maybe decisions were made which were wrong decisions but generally the point I make is clinicians make decisions about whether or not a patient needs to be admitted. Patients don't make those decisions," he said.

Effect of cuts

Opposition frontbencher Martin Hamilton-Smith has asked if SA Government funding cuts to Keith Hospital led to the tragic outcome.

"These are the unintended consequences of funding cuts like this to country communities," he said.

"There something like 350 cases like this a year that present at Keith Hospital requiring admission as a public patient, one a day on average who now won't be able to be admitted.

"This is a terrible decision to have to make, 'Do I get in a car and drive half an hour, three quarters of an hour to a hospital that can admit me or do I stay here and face a charge?'."

Keith Hospital's board recently decided it would no longer accept public patients for its acute care beds.

It said private patients would still be admitted, but any public patients will be charged $400 for acute care.

Mr Hender said the board understood some people might not be able to afford the fee, but there was no other choice and the decision had not been taken lightly.

Keith has a private and non-profit facility and the SA Government reduced its annual funding by about $370,000 because it said the scale of services was inappropriate for the hospital's relatively small caseloads.

Local residents have made clear their fury with an ongoing campaign to have funding restored.

Health Minister Hill was not ready to concede the $400 was a factor in the tragic chain of events last weekend, but Mr Hender said there was no doubt cost was a factor.

"Yes, indeed it was," he said.

Mr Hill said he would wait on findings from the Health Department, which has started a preliminary investigation of the death.

"Let's forget about who funds it. If that patient had a need to be admitted to a hospital, and I think clearly he did, then he should have been admitted and I want to know why the emergency ... we pay for the emergency services at the Keith Hospital," he said.